Q: Opening Photos first time from iPhoto on external drive - Please help!!
I have a MacBook Air with 256GB SSD hard drive and due to the limited space, I have for years had my iPhoto library on an external disk, connected to my Airport Extreme.
After upgrading to OSX 10.3.3 I click on the new Photos "app" on the MacBook Air by holding down the "alt option" key, in order to chose my iPhoto library, located on the external hard drive.
After several hours of a very slow moving status bar in Photos, I got the error message, that Photos needed at least 225GB of storage, in order to work.... I thought that Photos would just use the existing iPhoto library and convert it to a Photos library, but to me it seems like it is duplicating the iPhoto library to a new Photos library...?
Please, if anyone has stumbled upon this challenge them selves, any help would be much appreciated!
MacBook Air (mid 2011), i7 1.8GHz, 4GB Memory, 256GB SSD Disk, OS X 10.3.3
iPhoto 9.6.1
MacBook Air, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3), 13" 1.8GHz i7, 256SSD, 4GB 1333Mhz
Posted on Apr 11, 2015 2:17 AM
Just an update: for my issue (not being able to open iPhoto library with Photos), the fudge I did worked out alright. If anyone else gets the same problem (on the off-chance), here's a fix:
Locate your iPhoto library, which will be a package file. It defaults to being in your Photos folder, although you may have moved it
Right click on the package and select "get info"
Give the file the extension .photoslibrary
Hence if your iPhoto library is called iPhoto Library (which is the default), it should now read iPhoto Library.photoslibrary underneath "Name & Extension"
You should get a warning asking if you want to change the file extension - select okay
Open the Photos application, holding down the function key (either ⌥ or Alt)
Select the photo library you've just created
Let Photos do its thing
Note: Photos takes what feels like an age to upgrade an iPhoto library into a Photos library. It will appear to hang several times and you may even think its crashed. It probably hasn't - it's just very very slow. Sometimes it speeds up though too. My library took about 4 hours to upgrade, though I'm sure it could take a dozen hours if your library is big enough. The best thing to do is just to close down any unnecessary applications, switch off the wifi, turn off all the energy saver settings and just leave it to do its thing.
@perallin are you able to connect the external drive by USB or something similar?
Posted on Apr 12, 2015 2:19 PM